Taylor Swift’s ‘Lover’ Arrives the Old-Fashioned Way, and With Twists

As the pop music panorama has shifted over and over once more this decade, main artists have repeatedly tried to reinvent the album launch for a digital time: There have been shock albums, visible albums, albums edited after-the-fact, albums with little discover and no advance singles, streaming-only albums, video-only albums and so on.

And then there may be Taylor Swift, regular in her conventional pop playbook, with radio singles, music movies, journal covers, tv appearances and a stream of issues on the market, all on schedule.

Just earlier than the clock struck midnight on Friday, the singer, 29, launched “Lover,” her seventh album and first for Universal Music Group/Republic Records after greater than a decade on the Nashville-based label Big Machine. Swift, in the liner notes, known as the 18 tracks “a love letter to love itself — all the captivating, spellbinding, maddening, devastating, red, blue, gray, golden aspects of it (that’s why there are so many songs).”

“Lover” seems to start there, before indicating that Swift is ready to move on. The first track, “I Forgot That You Existed,” was written with Louis Bell and Frank Dukes, the production and songwriting team behind hits for Post Malone and Lorde, and appears to allude to West with lyrics like, “Free rent living in my mind/but then something happened one magical night/I forgot that you existed.”

The album was recorded largely in New York, at Electric Lady Studios in Manhattan, and features numerous geographic shout-outs to the area, as well as to London, the home of Swift’s boyfriend, the actor Joe Alwyn.

Songs written solely by Swift include “Lover,” “Cornelia Street,” and the album-closer, “Daylight”; she is also credited as a co-producer on every track, and as the executive producer of the album. Notably absent are the Swedish hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback, who have appeared on Swift’s three previous albums dating back to “Red” in 2012.

The second single “You Need to Calm Down,” another Little production, followed in June, complete with a cameo-heavy, L.G.B.T.Q.-themed video. That song also reached No. 2 — during the record-breaking run of “Old Town Road” — and currently sits at No. 18 on the Hot 100, while steadily increasing radio play has sent it to a peak position of No. 9 on the pop songs chart.

The advance tracks Swift has released since are more muted. The title track “Lover” is built around acoustic guitar — an instrument more prevalent on this album than on Swift’s previous two — while “The Archer,” made with Antonoff, is a synth-based build that never breaks.

In a typical Swift dichotomy, the album and its path to release have mixed moments of intimacy and introspection with bombast and headline-grabbing controversies.

There was an array of corporate partnerships — Capital One, Amazon, Target — a limited-edition merchandise collection with Stella McCartney and a slew of promotional appearances that will continue into next week, including “Good Morning America” on Thursday, “CBS Sunday Morning” this weekend and an opening performance slot at the MTV Video Music Awards on Monday.

Less carefully calibrated was Swift’s industry-shaking war of words, beginning in June, with her former label, Big Machine, and its new owner, the manager Scooter Braun. When Braun announced that he had acquired the company, along with the rights to Swift’s first six albums, she responded with a fiery open letter that accused Braun of bullying her with Kanye West, and called out Scott Borchetta, the Big Machine founder, for his leveraging of her master recordings. (As part of Swift’s new deal with Universal, she will own her work in the future, beginning with “Lover.”)

During her promotional tour this week, Swift nimbly returned to that conversation and steered the narrative, announcing plans to rerecord new versions of her old material that she would control beginning in November 2020, when she said her past contracts would allow it.

“I think that artists deserve to own their work,” Swift said on “Good Morning America.” “I just feel very passionately about that.”